Editor’s note: We came across this thoughtful article at The Decline and Fall of the United States of America blog. It is reposted here with the author’s permission.
Last week President Trump gave his second State of the Union Address after signing a temporary order to reopen the government for three weeks. The theme of the speech was America’s past and future greatness, which aligns with the president’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again”. To illustrate this theme, President Trump filled the gallery with representatives of America’s past heights: World War II veterans who stormed Normandy and liberated concentration camps, the second man on the moon Buzz Aldrin, and others from America’s golden age.
“Together we can break decades of political stalemate, we can bridge old divisions, heal old wounds, build new coalitions, forge new solutions and unlock the extraordinary promise of America’s future. The decision is ours to make. We must choose between greatness or gridlock, results or resistance, vision or vengeance, incredible progress or pointless destruction. Tonight I ask you to choose greatness.”
For President Trump, these reminders were supposed to inspire us to believe we can achieve such greatness once again. However, for this blog they instead demonstrated that the United States peaked long ago and is steadily and inexorably declining. I was reminded of another speech from many years ago that also implored its listeners to choose greatness. In 1964, the United States was nearing the end of its peak, which I mark from victory in World War II through the Apollo Program. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona was running against the incumbent President Lyndon Johnson, who had surrounded himself with the aura of the late John Kennedy’s Camelot. Goldwater was destined to lose in one of the largest landslides in American history, but his campaign is remembered for the emergence of a former actor onto the political stage.
Ronald Reagan’s speech that year echoes through history. The future president asked America if they would prefer the comfort of peace through surrender or the hardship involved in fighting for their liberties. Framed within the Cold War dynamic of Soviet socialism vs American free enterprise, Reagan warned that the easy choice could be the wrong choice:
“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”
During the speech, Reagan told a story of an acquaintance who had escaped Castro’s Cuba and counted himself lucky that he had a place to escape to. Reagan warns that if the United States falls then there will be no more places to which we can escape. More than fifty years later, this warning appears to be coming true. We had an opportunity to choose greatness in the 1960s, but instead we chose welfare, big government, and endless wars. When it gets really bad we turn to populists like Reagan or Donald Trump, but they are only able to slow the decline, rather than stop or reverse it.
Today President Trump signed a bloated budget bill that not only does little to build his long-promised border wall but actually makes it harder to secure the border at all. This is, of course, in addition to the billions of dollars our federal government wastes every year on ineffective programs, foreign aid, and payoffs to various lobby groups. For all his tough talk, even President Trump seems unable to stand against the Globalist swamp. That is the nature of a swamp. It engulfs whatever it touches, and its tentacles entangle themselves in everything. Like a hydra it cannot be simply killed by attacking one tentacle or another. It is likely our federal government is beyond saving, because the actions needed to destroy the swamp hydra would probably destroy the last vestiges of our constitutional government at the same time.
So what can be done? The deep state bureaucracy has made it impossible to change the federal government. The Globalist Party remains firmly entrenched in Washington, and their invade the world / invite the world agenda seems unstoppable. The decline of our civilization is evident everywhere you look:
With regards to health, we are all sick and dying. The nutritional advice given to us by our government for the last three generations has increased obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Government subsidizes unhealthy foods like corn and grain while demonizing the very meats and butter that our ancestors once ate. The nutritional tide is slowly turning, but it is too late for tens of millions of people who thought that forgoing meat and eating whole grains would save them from a painful and early death.
With regards to money, we are broke. Our government is more than $22 trillion in debt, and politicians don’t even talk about fixing that problem anymore. The average American is so in debt from college, credit cards, and car payments that the idea of digging out seems impossible. Most Americans don’t know how to budget or save money, and most Americans waste their money on gadgets and conspicuous consumption. Their only hope for retirement is an increasingly-insolvent Social Security program.
With regards to entertainment, we are selling our souls. Hollywood is filled with degenerate people who desperately want to normalize their degeneracy. They strive to steal the souls of our children and pervert them into their midst. Everything from children’s cartoons to the evening news to Hollywood blockbusters are full of propaganda: White people are evil. Christianity is evil. Men are evil. Women are stronger than men. Homosexuality is superior. Transgenderism should be celebrated. Islam is peaceful. Yet what happens when you look closely at the men and women pushing this propaganda? The stories of sexual assault by powerful media figures is probably only scratching the surface.
With regards to education, we are being brainwashed. Public schools care more about social justice and diversity than education. Children are taught that there are infinite genders but cannot read or figure. Inner-city schools have been abandoned to chaos. Colleges are taxpayer-funded indoctrination centers that make it their core mission to turn traditionally-minded students into Marxist social justice warriors. The entire education system is run by people who want white Christians dead and their children enslaved to an ideology that hates them.
With regards to our churches, we have all become lazy heretics. Mainstream denominations are more concerned with the latest Globalist social justice cause than they are about the Truth of the Gospel, while evangelical churches drown out the Gospel with their rock band worship service while driving out any trace of masculinity from the pulpit and the pews. The Catholic Church can’t seem to figure out that letting gay pedophiles have access to children is a bad idea. The old Anglican Church is more respecting of Islam than they are of the doctrines of Christianity. Protestant seminaries in the United States turn out pastors and theologians who don’t believe that Jesus Christ really existed.
With regards to gender relations, we are terribly confused. Men are taught to be humble, meek, effete, emotional, and apologetic. Women are taught to be aggressive, outspoken, brash, and masculine. The qualities of masculinity that built our civilization have become pathologies according to the APA. Courage, honor, and leadership are derided. We are being turned into C.S. Lewis’ men without chests. Boys are even being propagandized to mutilate themselves and become “female”.
With regards to family, we are going extinct. Family formation is discouraged among white Americans. We are told that children are expensive, they make us unhappy, and they are bad for the planet. The posterity of America’s Founding Fathers is being eliminated while barbarians are being invited to become heirs of their country. If you do not cheerfully agree to your own replacement then you are branded a racist, deplatformed, and fired from your job.
How can we choose greatness when we are surrounded by such decay? I would suggest you do not let your hearts be troubled. There is a way out of this mess. Remember the old prayer:
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Step back and focus on what is within your realm of influence. What things can you change? Start with yourself. Eat right. Get enough sleep. Lift weights. Save your money. Invest wisely. Make yourself the best you can be. Clear your environment of the things that would destroy you – Netflix, cable, advertising, and other bad influences. Read the Great Books. Fill your mind with the same things that the people who built our civilization pondered. Set goals and see them through. Stop living hand to mouth, day to day, and instead think of the future.
Next is your family. Take your children out of the indoctrination factories that are the public schools. Homeschool if you can. If not, find a classically-oriented Christian school, and vet it carefully. Your children are your future and your posterity, but our culture is trying desperately to drag them into degeneracy. You must protect them, and raise them in such a way that they carry on your work when they are grown. Don’t let media or daycare raise them. Stop letting cartoons and the internet consume their attention. Don’t feed the beast that wants to devour them. Teach them the stories of our ancestors that made our fathers’ fathers’ grow bold. Prepare them for a world that is worse than what you currently imagine. It will fall upon the next generation to rebuild when America finally falls.
Finally, your community. Build bonds with others who see the world in the same way. Find groups of people – in real life, not just the internet – who are preparing for the next hundred years like you are. Encourage each other and help each other. Protect each other. Share your skills. Teach each other to be self-sufficient if cut off from the rest of the country. Have yourself a tribe.
Above all, keep the long-term in mind. Don’t just live for today. Raise up your family in such a way that they will enjoy a reborn civilization rather than scrounging among the ruins of the old one. Remember that societies grow and flourish when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit. The future of Western civilization is in your hands, and it starts now. Choose greatness.
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